LeAnn Rimes releases new 'divorce album'

Euronews

LeAnn Rimes’s 11th studio album – ‘Spitfire’ – looks to set the record straight on her infidelity with Eddie Cibrian.

Rimes became a tabloid staple after cheating on her husband with the Sunset Beach actor and, following an ugly public fall-out, both stars divorced their respective partners and re-married.

Now, through songs like ‘What Have I Done’, ‘You’ve Ruined Me’ and ‘God Takes Care of Your Kind’, Rimes reflects on the circumstances that pushed her to divorce.

As the singer explains, whilst she wrote the album as a cathartic exercise, the reaction to its release has been a welcome one: “It’s exciting that people understand it but at the same time, I also felt so peaceful with it without anybody validating it, which is a huge thing to say. I just think that is the growth that I’ve been through. I really understand how I had grown as an artist and the music that I had made. I threw it out there and somehow, people are catching it and getting it and it’s so nice after being so misunderstood over the last few years and being misrepresented. I kind of feel like I have a say in my life again and it’s in the appropriate way, which is through my music.”

‘Spitfire’ follows in a long line of divorce albums. Amongst them, Usher’s ‘Papers’ was a personal ode to his split with Tameka Raymond, whilst Marvin Gaye’s ‘Here, My Dear’, chronicled his escape from ex-wife Anna Gordy.

For Rimes, mining such emotional depths was a draining, if not cathartic, exercise: “This album was written several years ago and it’s just coming out now. I’ve come out on the other side of all these really intense emotions after writing it, going through it, experiencing all of this recording, living it and so it’s a little less emotionally charged now. But there are moments when I can go back to those deep, deep emotions and those dark places.”